Sunday, May 20, 2012

Thanks to my friend and brother-in-law, Gregg Lewis, for forwarding this to me:

How To Write Good

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

• Avoid alliteration. Always. • Prepositions are not words to end sentences with. • Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.) • Employ the vernacular. • Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc. • Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary. • It is wrong to ever split an infinitive. • Contractions aren't necessary. • Foreign words and phrases are not apropos. • One should never generalize. • Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." • Comparisons are as bad as cliches. • Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous. • Profanity sucks. • Be more or less specific. • Understatement is always best. • Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement. • One-word sentences? Eliminate. • Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake. • The passive voice is to be avoided. • Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms. • Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed. • Who needs rhetorical questions?

By Frank L. Visco,
a vice-president and senior copywriter
at USAdvertising.